Our wonderful soil

the Merino Group rocks are soft, rich in lime and soda, andhigh in clay-forming minerals, lack a coarse fabric, are well supplied with potassium and moderately supplied withphosphorus

“The features of this landscape are the generally treeless dark heavy soils, a sharp escarpment at the junction with the tablelands, deep valleys with concave lower slopes and flat valley floors...The Casterton land-system extends over most of the area between and around Merino, Coleraine and Casterton andseparates the two sub-systems of the Glenelg land-system so that to the north-east, the Glenelg land-system is mainlyof earlier Palaeozoic rocks, whilst to the south-west, it is mainly of later rocks, early Cainozoic capping upperMesozoic. Both Kenley and Boutakoff refer to the soft nature of theMerino Group sediments. From all this, it is clear that the Merino Group rocks are soft, rich in lime and soda, andhigh in clay-forming minerals, lack a coarse fabric, are well supplied with potassium and moderately supplied withphosphorus.. an area of moderate rainfall, where the parent material is Mesozoic sediments, which are calcareous, soda-rich, without an open fabric and containing abundant clay-forming minerals or clay particles, the soils have thefollowing features:

uniformly heavy texture down the profile ; swelling clay throughout and therefore deeply cracking when dry but tightly closed when wet ; strong medium-sized structural units at the surface due to calcium

larger, well-formed units in the subsoil, because of sodium on the exchange complex, the faces of the units being slippery when first wetted.

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Tim Entwisle (Gardening Australia: A Change of Seasons) suggests we adopt at least 5 seasons, such is the variability of the Australian climate from region to region. he speaks from Sydney to Jane Edmanson:

“There’s an early spring, which I call Sprinter – August and September, there’s a Sprummer which comes after that for 2 months – October and November. There’s a long summer which goes right from December through to March, a short autumn, a short winter – both just two months long and then you’re back at Sprinter.”

He explains what he means by Sprinter. “Spring in Australia, particularly in southern Australia, comes a bit earlier – it comes in about August. That’s really when we start to see things flowering. It’s the time of year we see change.”

“Sprummer is a season between Sprinter – this early spring – and summer, but it’s a changeable season. One of the interesting things with Sprummer is that it’s quite windy in lots of parts of Australia, you get hot weather and cold weather. It’s a really transition time between Sprinter and Summer.”